Working as a Starbucks barista, I didn’t expect that my job serving iced matchas would collide with the most charged political discourse of the day. But on Sept. 16, I opened Twitter to a viral video of a customer ordering a drink and asking the woman at the register to write the name Charlie Kirk on it. The cashier said she wasn’t allowed to (though she did offer to write just the first name), citing company policy against writing anything “political” on cups. That brief exchange generated thousands of views, and the story got picked up by Fox News, the right-wing provocateur known as Libs of TikTok and conservative influencers.
Watching the video, my first thought was “that store needs to unionize yesterday.” That particular Starbucks location was now at the center of a social media outrage storm that could threaten the employees’ safety. Rather than forcefully coming to its employees’ defense, the company issued a statement saying that “names, on their own, can be used by customers on their cafe order, as they wish” and promised that the company was “working to understand what took place in this store.”
As any Starbucks employee could tell you, baristas are supposed to hand-write a friendly little message on customers’ cups. But the company places very firm limits on what that message can be: Slang, pop-culture references, current events and even anodyne messages like “Happy Black History Month” or “Happy Pride” are frowned upon, lest they be misinterpreted or give offense to someone, somewhere. In some cases, an unsanctioned message can result in discipline. The video shows what happens when someone insists on a name or message that sounds political: Baristas, often coded by the right as “woke,” can end up pinned between hostile customers intent on humiliating us and a company intent on insulating itself.
When the first Starbucks I worked at unionized, customers showed their support by ordering drinks under names like “Union Strong” and “Union Yes.” The company took a hard line, bringing in managers from other locations to staff the registers and instructing them not to write or print any “political” speech. Starbucks seems a lot more comfortable with political overtones now that some conservatives want to use baristas as props for cheap stunts.
That one video has spawned several others. They amount to a kind of humiliation ritual enacted both on a company that’s presented itself as progressive and on a labor force that’s known for including many people who are queer, nonwhite or immigrants — demographics that Mr. Kirk consistently denigrated. Rudy Giuliani gloated in triumphant all-caps, “STARBUCKS EMPLOYEES MUST WRITE CHARLIE KIRK’S NAME.” That “must” is the key. People on the far right seem to think they’ve harnessed Starbucks as their proxy, with the urge to discipline wokeness made real by the actual threat of discipline from our bosses.
This is a manifestation of what I call effigy politics. It eschews the work of democracy in favor of highly visible moments of symbolic dominance. It builds nothing. It only burns down.
Mr. Kirk was an expert practitioner. His work generated hundreds of videos and uncountable posts with titles like “Charlie Kirk SHUTS DOWN 3 Arrogant College Students.” He was on a mission to provide his base with viral moments of symbolic conquest over the sort of people they yearn to see humiliated. Mr. Kirk’s accused killer seems to have embraced his own twisted form of effigy politics. While his possible motives remain the subject of debate, nothing embodies the logic of destroying symbols better than the assassination of a YouTuber.
I don’t mean to equate these examples; there’s a universe of difference between mockery and deadly violence. By not standing up to the trolls, however, Starbucks allowed itself to be used as a tool for effigy politics.
Its statement in response to the original video implied that the employee might have acted improperly, when she was clearly just trying to follow the rules. A better response would be to stop requiring employees to write messages on cups (something the company has previously refused to bargain over). Most of all the company should have all baristas’ backs. We’re the ones facing hostile customers and hidden cameras.
Unions are a prime example of the kind of civic institutions that can save us from this pointless catharsis-seeking. They elevate workers from being powerless subjects of a boss to being participants in a democracy, with rights and powers of their own. It’s no wonder that President Trump achieved the height of his pre-presidential fame as a boss. His catchphrase — “You’re fired” — is a declaration of unilateral power that union workers fight back against every day. We got a taste of that power last week, when the company abruptly closed hundreds of stores, including mine.
That’s why we depend on our customers and our community to support us through ongoing negotiations, and especially to honor our picket line if we strike. But our effort to win a fair contract is just one battle in the broader struggle to rebuild the kind of civic institutions that once gave Americans faith in our common project. We need to rediscover hope for a politics that can offer us more than the fleeting warmth from effigies on fire.
Cassie Pritchard has been a union member with Starbucks Workers United since 2022.
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